The openATTIC project is currently transitioning to adapting the patch contribution signoff process initially established by the Linux Kernel developers, in which every commit message is “signed” with a special Signed-off-by: tag line, that certifies that the patch contribution meets certain criteria with regards to ownership/copyright and licensing.

The git distributed revision control system (DVCS) used by the Linux Kernel and many other projects actually provides an option --sign that can be passed to the git commit command, which will add the Signed-off-by: line at the end of the commit log message automatically.

However, the openATTIC code base is managed using the Mercurial DVCS, which currently does not offer the same functionality out of the box. Fortunately, Mercurial is written in Python and is very extensible: it is possible to extend its functionality and modify the workflows via Hooks and Extensions.

Much to my surprise, I was not able to find an existing plugin or extension that provides this functionality. So I took this opportunity to hone my Python skills and wrote one myself – signoff.py is a simple Mercurial hook, that will automatically add the signoff tag line below the commit message. Currently it is pretty rudimentary, I still need to read up on how to convert it into a proper Mercurial extension that extends the existing hg commit command, so the signoff process can be enabled by passing it as an option.

To enable it, dowmload the file and save it as signoff.py into the .hg directory of your Mercurial repository and add the following to .hg/hgrc:

[hooks]
precommit = python:.hg/signoff.py:sign_commit_message

If you have any suggestions or ideas on how to improve it, please let me know!

I’ve always been a fan of Brother, as their devices usually come with decent support for the Linux OS (at least initially). I have an MFC-7460DN Laser Printer / Scanner in my home office, that worked fine with Ubuntu Linux for the past few years. It’s hooked up to my DSL router’s ethernet switch and acts like a network printer for all of our devices.

Just to keep my mind flexible and to take a look at another Linux distribution for a change, I recently started using Fedora Workstation 23 on my Laptop (a company-issued Lenovo ThinkPad T440s). While the OS installation was painless and all main components like Video, Audio, Networking were detected and configured correctly out of the box, the post-installation of some tools and services required some more effort.

This time, the printing part of the MFC-7460DN took me quite some time to figure out. While Brother provides RPM packages of the drivers, they are 32-bit only, and the instructions hadn’t been updated since Fedora 12. The first thing I had to do was to download two driver RPM packages. I initially started with the newer versions of the drivers, brgenml1cupswrapper-3.1.0 and brgenml1lpr-3.1.0, but somehow did not get them to work at all. I then tried the older packages, mfc7460dnlpr-2.1.0 and cupswrapperMFC7460DN-2.0.4. These installed flawlessly, and a new printer was added to the CUPS configuration automatically.

However, it was configured as a local printer, so I first had to change the existing configuration to talk to the remote LPD port instead. While the printer configuration looked correct and no errors showed up, all print jobs simply disappeared into the bit bucket, without any visible error on the application side. Unfortunately the web-based CUPS administration tool was not much helpful, either – the button View Error Log simply returned a “Not found” error. There was no error log file in /var/log/cups, so I queried the status of the CUPS service via systemd next.

Since this is a 32-bit binary, it might help to actually install a 32-bit version of the GNU C library! I simply forgot this step, even though it’s documented in the installation instructions. A simple dnf install glibc.i686 got me over this hurdle.

Unfortunately the print jobs still did not reach the printer and disappeared in the void! Checking the CUPS error log again, I now saw this: